Dr. Brakman's scholarship focuses on ethics, clinical bioethics, and social and political philosophy. She has published on filial obligation and long-term care policy, decision making for the mentally challenged, ethics in assisted reproductive technologies and adoption ethics. She is a nationally recognized expert in the field of the ethics of embryo donation, and she is a clinical trained bioethicist, serving as such for hospital systems and non-profit behavioral and mental health providers.

Walter Brogan, Ph.D.

Dr. Brogran is interested in ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary continental philosophy. His research work often focuses on the intersection of these two areas of Philosophy. He has done extensive work on contemporary European philosophers, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Agamben, Nancy and Derrida. He is currently working on a project on Nietzsche and tragedy and another project on the postmodern community.

Thomas Busch, Ph.D.

Dr. Busch’s interests and publications center upon phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. This includes philosophers such as Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Marcel, Ricoeur, Gadamer and Levinas. Problems that he addresses concern the body, subjectivity, sociality and communication, language and meaning, oppression and alienation, and ethics.

Julie Klein, Ph.D.

Dr. Klein's primary research interests lie in 17th century philosophy; she writes mostly about
Descartes and Spinoza. Other interests include medieval philosophy (especially Jewish and Islamic thought), contemporary continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Dr. Klein's research focuses upon philosophical understandings of the relationships of thinking, embodiment and affectivity. Most recently, she’s been working more on political philosophy, including topics such as religious toleration, sovereignty, and the use of torture.

Georg Theiner, Ph.D.

Georg Theiner received his PhD in Philosophy, with a Joint PhD in Cognitive Science, at Indiana University in 2008. Before joining Villanova in 2011, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. He also holds degrees in Philosophy and Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Vienna. He works primarily in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with occasional forays into metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. In his book Res Cogitans Extensa: A Philosophical Defense of the Extended Mind Thesis (2011), Theiner argues that distinctively human cognition is not confined to the biological boundaries of skin or skull, but relies on, and actively incorporates an astounding variety of bodily, technological, social, and cultural resources. His research focuses on theories of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (‘4e’) cognition, socially distributed and collective cognition, the role of language and writing as technologies of the mind, and the history and future of cognitive enhancement. He likes to talk about all things philosophical – so, if you’re curious, please send him an email to set up an appointment.

James Wetzel, Ph.D.

Dr. Wetzel investigates the religious dimensions of the philosophical life, or what might be thought of as philosophical piety. He looks especially at Augustine and the transition in Western philosophical thought from a Platonic discourse about virtue, ignorance, and the Good to an Augustinian focus on sin and grace. The investigation involves him broadly in questions of metaphysics and moral psychology and requires some flexibility of mind as to what constitutes genuinely philosophical discourse. His most frequent modern interlocutor is Wittgenstein.

About Villanova

Villanova University was founded in 1842 by the Order of St. Augustine. To this day, Villanova’s Augustinian Catholic intellectual tradition is the cornerstone of an academic community in which students learn to think critically, act compassionately and succeed while serving others. There are more than 10,000 undergraduate, graduate and law students in the University’s six colleges.